Steven Soderbergh's Twitter Novella Is Now a Hardcover Book (But You Can Read It Online)

The "retired" director tweeted a novella called Glue earlier this year, and it has an expensive hardcover edition. You can read it online for free, though.

Retirement means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For Steven Soderbergh, it has meant, turning his attention away from directing theatrical releases at a breakneck pace, and working on any number of other projects instead. One such project involved writing a novella on Twitter and then publishing it in hardcover.

In April, Soderbergh started sending out a string of connected tweets from the unlikely handle @Bitchuation. These dispatches have since been deleted, but the first one read:

I will now attempt to tweet a novella called Glue.

This tweet was followed by one reading "Chapter One" and then a flood of words and the occasional image that added up to seven chapters of hardboiled fiction.

The director is by no means the first to disseminate a longform piece on Twitter, but along with Jennifer Egan's experiment for the New Yorker in 2012, he is among the most high-profile to do so.

Now complete at 41 chapters, Glue is available in hardcover on Soderbergh's website, Extension765, one of the many ventures he's begun in retirement. The site also sells fancy booze, and T-shirts that contain esoteric references to classic movies. If you're not sure about whether to purchase the expensive and rare hardcover (Soderbergh only printed 50 copies to start), you can read the entire text here.